There seem to be two primary forms of Irish self-assessment. One is that we are the most vibrant, culturally vigorous, charming, amiable, witty and energetic people in the world who have much to congratulate ourselves for. The other is that we are shifty, shallow, vapid, unreliable, hypocritical, inconstant, lazy and, worst of all, self-congratulatory, writes Kevin Myers.
The last bit is where the two assessments meet. For self-congratulatoriness is the great besetting Irish sin, and the primary reason why, not surprisingly, the Irish are the second most unpopular tourists throughout Europe. Self-congratulation is everywhere in Irish life. A witless chant of sure-aren't-we-a-grand-people-altogether fills our airwaves. Entire brands of music are dedicated to it. We have a perception of ourselves that only we are able to have a good time: the craic agus ceoil myth, often enough expressed in a loud and loutish drunkenness.
The Wolfe Tones
I hestitate to stray onto Fintan O'Toole's territory here, but in a column in this newspaper last January, and apparently believing that they would be as good as their word, he celebrated the promised break-up of the group The Wolfe Tones. He and I do not agree on everything, but on the question of The Wolfe Tones, we are, I think, as one.
The tragic news is that seven months later, The Wolfe Tones are not now silent. Three of their members now sing as Former Members of the Wolfe Tones, if "sing" is the right word to describe their cretinously nationalistic, self-congratulatory caterwauling.
Yet never mind their music and the imbecilic banality of their lyrics. They are an important social phenomenon. The Wolfe Tones provided the sound-track to over 30 years of war: they were the laureates and the bards of those diseased IRA anthems that filled clubs and pubs throughout the land, when real blood was being shed, and real lives lost.
How could such a vile crew survive down the decades? Musically they were an atrocity; politically they were tribal primitives. But they prospered because there is an enormous market for songs declaring how wonderful the Irish are and how abominable are the English; and that market exists because of an endemic low self-esteem, which is the other side of the same abysmal coin of self-congratulation.
That dualism exists without irony, subtlety, or any sense of paradox. The Gleneagles Hotel in Killarney is currently promoting its attractions using a Basil Fawlty sound-alike who compares Fawlty Towers unfavourably with the Gleneagles. One of the attractions which Basil Fawlty finds he cannot match is that the Gleneagles Hotel cabaret features Former Members of the Wolfe Tones.
Grotesque incongruity
Now, how utterly lost to reality must you be to think that even a faux Basil Fawlty would lament the fact that Wolfe Tones of any kind, former or otherwise, are not playing in his establishment? The Wolfe Tones jeered at his country, bawled hatred for it and its people, and celebrated the IRA war; yet the management of the Gleneagles Hotel, and the advertising agency responsible, seem utterly unaware of the grotesque incongruity involved in their advertisement.
It is as if they don't hear what is being said; as if the Wolfe Tones' endlessly reiterated anti-English sentiments actually have no genuine meaning, and are intended simply to be proof of what great, fun-loving characters the Irish people really are. In other words, words don't count, and you English tourists, here at the Gleneagles, you shouldn't be so sensitive, when we bawl and spit, God's curse on you England, you cruel hearted bastards. . .
It is this same, almost pathological insensitivity to other people's feelings which in part explains why Irish tourists are increasingly loathed across Europe, especially now that we have the money to travel. Local sensitivities, local mores, local habits - these count for absolutely nothing when the "you'll never beat the Irish" crowd are staggering through some foreign town wearing their Glasgow Celtic shirts, and being great and noisy characters until dawn.
At least the English lager-lout is not under the misapprehension that he is loved when he is being obnoxious. He is reviled, and he knows it, and he takes a perverse pride in the hatred people feel for him. But the noisy, look-at-me, I'm-Irish buffoon - he genuinely thinks he's loved, and any suggestion that he and his type are odious pests is instantly dismissed as paddy-bashing prejudice.
Because co-existing with the insensitivity to other people's feelings is an acute sensitivity about our own. We are ever eager to detect an insult where none is intended, anxious to find anti-Irishness in the most blameless observations. How many Irish people will pay no attention to commentators on the BBC saying nice things about the Irish, but will pounce with glee upon any remark which is perceived to be anti-Irish?
Aggressive victimhood
This is the market which the Wolfe Tones played to, of aggressive victimhood and loud-mouthed insecurity. That market is still there, still insisting that anything less than unconditional love for the Irish is proof of bigotry. Such querulous self-regard goes rather well with our neurosis about neutrality, and the widespread belief that because we are unable to defend a single beach of our national territory, we are morally superior to those other countries which actually provide our defence.
So we should be grateful for the Wolfe Tones. While such as they can make a handsome living peddling their noisy and tuneless self-pity, we know we have a pathological problem about what we are and the way we think of ourselves. They're not really the illness (though Christ, they sound like it); they're just the symptom.